Quick one on our attitudes to data
I find a lot of the responses to this tweet by Tunde Leye to be indicative of the kind of society Nigeria is. A man made an inference based on data. As of the time of writing this, 19 people have quoted the tweet.
Not one person has said, “O, this data is misleading, because x.”
Rather, seven have gone straight to the word, “bigot”.
It is rather interesting when your default response is an ad hominem, and even more interesting when it is a whip that has been used so often that it has now lost its value.
As one of the original “bigots” on Nigerian Twitter, I have seen this clan of bigots grow in number ever since I was first called a bigot after this tweet in April 2015. The bigot clan has become more cosmopolitan too. Time was when that tag was reserved exclusively for Igbo people. I observed that as well.
But times are changing it appears. As of last year, Saatah Nubari and William Ukpe, who are bonafide South-South boys, had become bigots. Now our bigotry country is expanding to include South-West chaps like Tunde.
On a serious note, some discussions are meant to be had. Nigeria as it currently is, is not working. The process of getting it to work, or deciding that it cannot work and thus untangling the whole thing, will be messy. And in that messiness, we can’t afford for narrow-minded people to dominate the conversation simply because they have the ability to make noise and move in packs on social media.
Let us look briefly at Tunde’s argument.
Katsina and Maradi border one another, have similar geographies, similar vegetation, and crucially, similar teledensities.
This is open-source data, and I’ve been to both places, so the attack that Tunde hasn’t gone around doesn’t fly. What I’d expect is someone to explain why Katsina has a far larger population density than Maradi, so we can have a healthy debate, and understand each other without all this illiterate name-calling.
But I’ve concluded that that’s too much to ask.
From my point of view luckily, because they have used this strategy way too often, it is beginning to lose its potency.
When our knock-off jersey printing friend first called me bigot back in April 2015, it made me reflect and made me cautious. I mean, just a month back we’d all been on the same side. How come had I become a bigot?
But as the word kept being thrown again and again each time I voiced an opinion that the herd did not want to be aired, I realised that this word, and other forms of attack, were a weapon meant to silence alternative voices. It made me stronger. I’ve also noticed that it has made others stronger too. This is the thing about the misuse of a weapon that can’t kill. It only makes your adversary stronger.
Now as to the reactions that prompted this piece. Unfortunately, this is the general Nigerian attitude to new information that the Nigerian does not like, no matter how factual. We attack the source of the information rather than look critically at it. This attitude is a national culture. It is the reason why we have been pumping money into an Ajaokuta that has for 40 years not produced one ingot of steel. It is safe to say that we will keep chasing political settlements rather than economically sound decisions. It is safe to say that Nigeria is unlikely to ever develop.